Exhalation, by Ted Chiang

Short spec-fic stories.

Damn Chiang is so good — almost a great philosopher, let alone a great writer. And clearly knows his tech, too. A good combination, in this day and age.

I find his ideas on AI and progress interesting in their own right, independent of the stories. Though when I imagine what it would look like to just present/assert those ideas without the stories I guess it wouldn’t be that much fun. I don’t know, sometimes I think our whole concept of non-fiction is broken in regards to lots of topics like this — I’m imagining what Chiang would have to do if he were pitching a magazine a non-fic piece about eg how he thinks it’d take twenty years of care and work to raise an AI to productive human adult levels (the same as it takes with a human), and how much BS “proof” he’d have to offer from studies and papers stretched beyond reason, whereas really... he’s just asserting this position, and that’s ok! It’s thought-provoking (and probably correct, in my equally-unproven view). And the story allows him to just do that.

This is the only book I’ve ever read with interesting author notes after each story — if anything I wish they were longer.

Also noteworthy is Chiang'fs willingness to write from/about different cultures, eg a Middle Eastern story and one with an African tribal narrator. The Middle Eastern one is specifically about a door that allows time travel but doesn’t allow the traveler to change the past in any way, based apparently on a Kip Thorne lecture Chiang attended where Thorne said this was the one form of time travel he could think of that wouldn’t violate Einstein. Chiang says he thought a Muslim setting would suit this because of Muslim ideas about destiny. I think that story basically captures the Chiang style/aesthetic/quality.

A final interesting thing: one of the stories contrasts written cultures with storytelling/oral cultures, and includes a line that “reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself”. And I had to laugh because I was listening to this line on audiobook while other people were reading it on paper, and the implications of it are kind of opposite in those two cases. I still think audiobooks are an underrated technology with huge implications, I think a broader switch to audio is probably right on the horizon.